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The average worker today stays at each of his or her jobs for 4.4 years, according to the most recent available data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but the expected tenure of the workforce's youngest employees is about half that.

Ninety-one percent of Millennials (born between 1977-1997) expect to stay in a job for less than three years, according to the Future Workplace “Multiple Generations @ Work” survey of 1,189 employees and 150 managers. That means they would have 15 - 20 jobs over the course of their working lives!

So what would all this job-hopping do for young workers' careers? For applicants, job instability on a resume could come at the cost of the dream job. For years, experts have warned that recruiters screen out chronic job-hoppers, instead seeking prospective employees who seem to offer longevity.

Talent acquisition managers and heads of Human Resources make a valid case for their wariness of resumes filled with 1-2-year stints. They question such applicants' motivation, skill level, engagement on the-job and ability to get along with other colleagues.

These hiring managers worry they'll become the next victims of these applicant's hit-and-run jobholding. For companies, losing an employee after a year means wasting precious time and resources on training & development, only to lose the employee before that investment pays off. Plus, many recruiters may assume the employee didn't have time to learn much at a one-year job.

The Upside of Job Hopping

But for newly minted college graduates, job-hopping can speed career advancement. According to a paper out of the St. Olaf's Sociology Department entitled "Hiring, Promotion, and Progress: Millennials’ Expectations in the Workplace," changing jobs and getting a promotion in the process allows Gen Y employees to avoid the "dues paying" that can trap workers in a painfully slow ascent up the corporate ladder.

Job hopping can also lead to greater job fulfillment, which is more important to Gen Y workers than it was to any previous generation: A 2012 survey by Net Impact found that 88 percent of workers considered "positive culture" important or essential to their dream job, and 86 percent said the same for work they found "interesting." Job-hopping helps workers reach both of these goals, because it means trying out a variety of roles and workplaces while learning new skills along the way.

And economic instability has erased, especially for younger workers, the stigma that has accompanied leaving a job early. That's because strategic hopping been all but necessary for as long as they can remember. Workers today know they could be laid off at any time – after all, they saw it happen to their parents – so they plan defensively and essentially consider themselves "free agents.

If that freedom seems an undue privilege, think again. The downside to the freedom they enjoy is financial insecurity worse than any other generation in the past half-century. That's a sufficient price to pay.

So while Baby Boomers started working with an eye on gaining stability, raising a family, and "settling down," today's young workers take none of that for granted. Instead, as shown by Net Impact's survey, they are more concerned than their predecessors with finding happiness and fulfillment in their work lives

Indeed, since humans have been proven to be terrible at predicting what will make us happy (as shown by Harvard happiness guru Daniel Gilbert), it's crucial that we find it through trial-and-error.